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When I was a young whippersnapper, finding information about any subject meant leaving the house and driving to a public building called a "library" where information resided in huge stacks of printed books. Because you had to look things up manually, at a relatively high cost-of-your-time per search, casual browsing was much less common than it is today. In fact, the old-style printed encyclopedias existed mainly as the one place in the dead-tree world where it was relatively easy to have a search lead to an expanding skein of other, increasingly speculative searches.
Search engines have now made it easy for us to winnow the information available online and draw conclusions from its diversity of bias. Now imagine the potential of an Internet that contained all of the information in printed libraries! What the government needs to do for us is not vainly try to outperform Google in searching and serving data, but to exercise its legal function: fix the intellectual-property mess that keeps us from putting entire libraries online. Develop, say, a simplified legal framework for giving authors an automated share of search engine ad revenues, and the techies will happily implement it.
